Blog o cestovaní nielen po Japonsku / Travel blog

20. March 2014

Príchod do Tokia / Arrival in Tokyo

EN: Since I booked a flight with Turkish Airlines from Vienna to Tokyo Narita Airport, I had to travel to Austrian capital. Everything went smoothly on Schwechat Airport, I was also quite happy with the in-flight comfort and the meals. We had to stop in Istanbul and transfer to another plane, which was a bit of a pain, as the waiting premises in Turkish airport were too warm for my personal standards, plus the shops were not accepting Euros. Well, at least the didn’t make it clear that they were – once you asked, they were actually happy to sell you a bottle of water in exchange for this currency. I never thought about taking Turkish Liras with me, so that may be my fault.

I was actually a little bit worried about Japanese customs and immigration control, as I had to face numerous questions in Vienna and in Istanbul in a sense ‘are you really sure you can travel to Japan without visas?’ and so on. Being from a little central European country is tough, that is a fact. Everything went fine on Narita, the immigration control check was actually pretty quick, they took my picture and my fingerprints (not a good news for all the conspiracy theorists), I answered some questions about my business in Japan and about my place of stay and that was it.

EN: Since all the preparations for my trip were rather long, I got myself quite a lot of information about arrival to Japan and I knew that I could get a one-way NEX (Narita Express train to Tokyo) ticket together with SUICA card (IC card for public transport, which is valid pretty much everywhere in Japan, with some exceptions, like Okinawa, or trams and some buses) for a special price – 3500 Yen. I am not sure if this special offer is stil valid, so please check the JR website before your trip. I got a one-way ticket to Musashi-Kosugi station and a SUICA card with a 2000 Yen credit, which was more than enough for a couple of days. It takes around 70 minutes to get to Tokyo from Narita airport, so be prepared for that.

There is, however, one problem. I was not the only one getting into this confusion – the thing is that the people behind the counter who are selling the tickets have the option to switch their stuff into English and Romaji, so the people who can’t read Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana can deal with their train tickets easily. This unfortunately didn’t happen to me, so I had a ticket with Japanese characters only and that caused a bit of a mess. The other fact was that the train to Tokyo was divided into two parts – the first one continued to Ofuna and the other one was detached in Shinagawa and headed towards Takao. So it wasn’t easy to find my car, until the moment I figured out which numbers were referring to my car and seat number. Once you get to Japan and you start using all the trains more frequently, it gets much easier to identify the stuff on the tickets, but since that was my first time in the country and on the train I had to deal with this.

But eventually I got to my house in Meguro (Musashi-Koyama) and from that moment everything was smooth and easy.